For someone a little bit lower key, there's the incredible life of Julie d'Aubigny. Her father worked for King Louis XIV's Master of the Horse, and trained her in fencing. By the age of 12 she was better at it than her male peers. Two years later, she became her father's boss's mistress, and not long after that she was married off to another noble. The same year, her new husband got a new position in the south of France, but she was kept in Paris. Also the same year, she got involved with an assistant fencing master. After the cops tried to arrest him for killing a man in an illegal duel, he and Julie ran away together, performing fencing shows and singing in taverns to make a living on the way to Marseille. When they got to Marseille, she joined an opera company.

During one of her opera performances, a girl fell in love with Julie, and they had an affair. When the girl's parents sent her to live in a convent, Julie stole a dead body, broke into that girl's room, set it on fire and faked the girl's death so they could run away together... For three months, before that girl went back to live with her parents.

Being a wanted woman in the area for body-snatching, arson, and kidnapping, she left and headed back for Paris. On her way there, she met a man in a tavern who mistook her for a man (she often dressed as one), and they had a duel. She beat him, and they became short-term lovers and lifelong friends. Also on the way to Paris, she met an old actor who gave her singing lessons, and also found a new lover, a singer who got her a new opera gig in Paris.

Then she turned 18, and had a relatively normal life as an opera singer, still beating men and bedding women until she died at the age of 33.

I find General Curtis LeMay very interesting, especially during WW2, after that he becomes simultaneously much less influential and also much more controversial. And also I know less about that period of his life, mostly because I didn't put in as much effort trying to find out about it.

But during WW2 he was incredibly influential, especially considering he was only a 2 star general by the end. When he arrived in Europe in 1942, he was a Major, and was in command of the 305th Bomb Group. When he arrived in England, he heard from the British pilots tons of stories about how deadly the German AA was. The British had resorted to night bombing to avoid the AA, and advised the Americans not to fly straight and level for more than 10 seconds if they wanted to come back alive.

LeMay knew from experience in training that it would be impossible to line up a decent bomb run with only 10 seconds of straight flying. Up until the night of his first mission he was fairly undecided on whether or not to take the advice of the British airmen, or to risk a straight approach in exchange for the increased accuracy it would provide. Based on some quick math and an artillery manual he'd happened to bring with him which he used to estimate the hit probability of the AA guns, he decided to ignore the warning of the British. To encourage his men to believe him, he personally flew the lead bomber on their first mission.

3 weeks after that orders came down from the top that all bombers should make straight and level approaches to the targets, since the increased risk was more than offset by the increased accuracy. LeMay continued to occasionally lead missions to keep morale up even after being promoted to Colonel and then General, he wouldn't do it every time but considered it important for keeping everyone motivated.

In 1944, LeMay was transferred to China, where he was in charge of bombing Japanese ports and other facilities in occupied China. He did a fairly good job here too, especially in comparison to General Hansell, who was tasked with bombing the Japanese home islands. Granted, this was not a fair comparison, because the weather over China was much more favorable than the weather over Japan. But nonetheless, General Arnold (the commander of the USAAF) replaced General Hansell with LeMay in early 1945. From February to March, LeMay continued to fail to perform in exactly the same way Hansell had. The constant cloud cover over Japan, combined with the jetstream blowing bombs off course, made accurate bombing of factories impossible. And between the Manilla massacre, the invasion of Iwo Jima, and pressure from Arnold (who had staked his career and the future of the independent air force on the success of the B-29 strategic bomber) LeMay felt he absolutely had to do something to get results, both to avoid getting replaced and to end the war faster.

And this is where his story gets interesting, because normally 2 star generals do not get to set policy. They'll have some latitude in how they carry it out, but ultimately they still have to answer to their CO. Up until March 9, 1945, the USAAF had a policy of only bombing strictly military targets, in contrast to their British allies who were much more willing to hit cities. This had been challenged by the firebombing of Dresden, but that had resulted in an inquiry which had decided that the railways and factories made Dresden a military target, and that had also been done as a joint operation with the British to help relations with the Soviets.

But hitting Japanese factories was simply not working, so LeMay decided to try new tactics. By having his bombers fly at night, they could ditch their defensive guns and come in much lower, allowing them to carry roughly double the payload of bombs as they could in daylight (daylight bombing at low altitude or without defensive guns would be suicidal). And because the accuracy problems would be even further reduced due to the inability to see at night, LeMay changed the target from a single factory to a ~12 square mile section of urban Tokyo. Hard to miss that. The bombers would also carry napalm, which was projected to be incredibly lethal against the Japanese cities, although prior uses from high altitude had resulted in little effect (which also convinced the Japanese that they did not need to improve their firefighting capabilities. They were incorrect).

Planners thought the mission had a high chance of being a complete disaster, due to the new tactics and lack of any defenses on the bombers, but LeMay was convinced that Japanese night-fighting capability was minimal. However, he completely neglected to inform General Arnold, or anyone else above him, as to his plans. According to LeMay himself this was because he thought the mission was risky, and if it failed he didn't want it to bring down General Arnold or the USAAF in general. On March 9, LeMay's bombers left their airfields and around midnight the first bombs started falling on Tokyo.

By morning, at absolute minimum 100,000 people were dead and another million homeless. The exact death toll for any bombing raid in WW2 usually has pretty significant error bars so its hard to compare things, but this raid was almost certainly more deadly than the blast of the nuke at Hiroshima, possibly more deadly than Hiroshima even including radiation, and definitely more deadly than the bomb at Nagasaki including radiation. At minimum 4 times more people died than during the Dresden bombing.

But LeMay had his 'results', in the form of aerial photography showing that approximately 17 square miles of urban Tokyo was burned out. The response from both the press and General Arnold were both positive, and LeMay continued hitting Japan with similar (if less deadly, due to Japanese preparation, luck, and the fact that he'd already destroyed the most flammable section of Tokyo) raids every other night for 10 days until he ran out of napalm. When LeMay had destroyed the initial 6 cities that had been recommended for firebombing by the Strategic Bombing Survey (although they had been imagining high altitude, daylight bombing), the SBS recommended to General Arnold that LeMay revert back to traditional daylight precision bombing. LeMay proposed his own plan, which was effectively to rank the remaining Japanese cities in order of how flammable they were, and work his way down the list. LeMay's plan got Arnold's approval.

From then on, the bombers would primarily launch incendiary attacks, although whenever weather was good precision raids against factories would be attempted, and other bombers would be diverted to help Admiral Nimitz with aerial minelaying operations (which proved incredibly deadly in their own way, doing a huge amount to cut off Japan from food imports it desperately needed). In this environment, the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities was a natural decision that nobody seriously questioned.

For all the talk the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan gets, especially with the Oppenheimer movie, I'm always annoyed that LeMay's singlehanded decision to burn Tokyo on March 9 hardly gets any mention. The firebombings in general may come up, but always as a fait accompli, something that was doomed to happen from the start, and not the unilateral decision of one man. If LeMay had decided the plan was too risky, or if Arnold had trusted Hansell and left him in command of the XXI Bomber Group, then WW2 in the Pacific could have had a different ending. Not necessarily better or worse, but different.